How to Breed Horses in Minecraft

A wild horse is a lottery ticket. It might gallop like the wind or plod like it is underwater, and you cannot tell which until you ride it. Breeding is how you stop gambling: pair up your two best horses, and over a few generations you can produce a mount that is fast, tough and can practically jump over houses. Here is how the whole system works.

What You Need

• 2 adult tamed horses — untamed horses will not breed, full stop
• 2 golden carrots or golden apples — one per horse; golden carrots are far cheaper, costing gold nuggets instead of ingots, and master farmers sell them too

Taming comes first. Mount a wild horse with an empty hand and stay on while it bucks you off; repeat until hearts appear. Feeding it sugar, wheat, apples or carrots between attempts speeds the process up. Do the same with your second horse, then lead both into a pen or a small field where they cannot wander off mid-romance.

Breeding, Step by Step

Stand close to one tamed horse, aim at it and use the golden carrot. Hearts float up — it is in love mode. Feed the second horse the same way, and the two will drift towards each other. A few seconds later a foal appears, and you gain a little XP for your matchmaking. Both parents then sit out a 5-minute cooldown before they can breed again. The foal is small, useless as transport for now, and grows into an adult after about 20 minutes; feeding it apples, sugar, wheat or hay bales makes it grow up faster.

How Foal Stats Are Inherited

Every horse has three hidden stats, rolled individually, so two horses that look identical can perform completely differently:

For reference, you sprint at about 5.6 blocks per second, so even an average horse nearly doubles your travel speed. A foal's stats start from the average of its two parents, then a random twist is applied that can push a stat above the better parent or drag it below the worse one. Coat colour and markings usually copy one parent, with a chance of something random. The practical strategy follows from this: test your horses, breed the best two, and whenever a foal turns out stronger than its weakest parent, retire that parent and breed the foal in its place. Repeat, and each generation creeps closer to the maximum.

Mules, Donkeys and the Undead

Tame a donkey the same way you tamed the horses, feed it and a tamed horse a golden carrot each, and you get a mule. Mules are the only way donkeys and horses cross, they can wear a chest for extra inventory on long trips — and they are sterile, so every mule has to be bred fresh. Skeleton horses and zombie horses cannot breed at all, in any combination. If you ever find yourself wanting to freeze a foal at its cutest, this guide's last tip is a golden dandelion: feed one to a baby horse and its growth pauses, keeping it a foal permanently.